1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a method and system for recorded word concatenation designed to build a natural-sounding utterance.
2. Description of Related Art
Many speech synthesis methods and systems in existence today produce a string of words or sounds that, when placed in the normal context of speech, sound awkward and unnatural. This unnaturalness in speech is evident when speech synthesis techniques are applied to such areas as providing telephone numbers, credit card numbers, currency figures, etc. These conventional methods and systems fail to consider basic prosodic patterns of naturally spoken utterances based on acoustic information, such as timing and fundamental frequency.
A method and system are provided for performing recorded word concatenation to create a natural sounding sequence of words, numbers, phrases, sounds, etc. for example. The method and system may include a tonal pattern identification unit that identifies tonal patterns, such as pitch accents, phrase accents and boundary tones, for utterances in a particular domain, such as telephone numbers, credit card numbers, the spelling of words, etc.; a script designer that designs a script for recording a string of words, numbers, sounds, etc., based on an appropriate rhythm and pitch range in order to obtain natural prosody for utterances in the particular domain and with minimum coarticulation so that extracted units can be recombined in other contexts and still sound natural; a script recorder that records a speaker""s utterances of the scripted domain strings; a recording editor that edits the recorded strings by marking the beginning and end of each word, number etc. in the string and including silences and pauses according to the tonal patterns; and a concatenation unit that concatenates the edited recording into a smooth and natural sounding string of words, numbers, letters of the alphabet, etc., for audio output.
These and other features and advantages of this invention are described in or are apparent from the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments.